Scottish writer Scott Creighton claims to have discovered secrets about Egypt that will change our understanding of civilization. His new book, released yesterday, is entitled The Secret Chamber of Osiris: Lost Knowledge of the Sixteen Pyramids (Bear & Company, 2015), and it comes (redundantly) with an endorsement and foreword from Rand Flem-Aths, the Canadian author who believes that Atlantis was located in Antarctica. Before we begin discussing Creighton’s book, I’d like to take a moment to offer a comparison. Here on the left is Creighton discussing the pyramids, and on the right is Sir John Mandeville, the medieval fraud, writing around 1357:

Creighton (2015)There are simply too many anomalies, too many affronts to common sense, too many facts that simply do not fit the tomb paradigm that is so embraced by the Egyptologists.

Mandeville (1357)…if they were sepultures, they should not be void within, ne they should have no gates for to enter within; for ye may well know, that tombs and sepultures be not made of such greatness, nor of such highness; wherefore it is not to believe, that they be tombs or sepultures.

Have we really made so little progress since the Middle Ages? Apparently not, since Creighton’s major thesis is taken directly from medieval pyramid lore, as he explicitly admits. Let me offer another comparison. After scoffing at Egyptologists for declaring the pyramids tombs, Creighton explains that he believes they were actually designed to preserve Egyptian culture from Great Flood:

… first sixteen pyramids built in ancient Egypt were perceived as and would come to represent the allegorical “dismembered body of Osiris,” the ancient Egyptian god of agriculture and rebirth, and that through the agency of Osiris it was hoped that the kingdom could be reborn after an anticipated cataclysm—the great deluge of Thoth.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s (intentionally) almost identical to Islamic-era pyramid myths of the Middle Ages, like those found in Al-Maqrizi’s Al-Khitatof the 1400s:

It was argued that these monuments were tombs, but this is not true; their builder erected them because he foresaw the Flood and he knew that this cataclysm would destroy everything on the surface of the earth, except what could be stored in buildings such as these two pyramids [at Giza]. Thus, he stored within them all the valuables and treasures he could, and the Flood having occurred, then subsiding, the entire contents of the pyramids became the property of Bansar bin Mizraim bin Ham bin Noah. (1.40, my trans.)

The Osiris-pyramid correlation as seen in Creighton's book.

To be fair, there is a small difference. For the Arab rulers of Egypt, the pyramids were not symbolic of Osiris, god of the dead, but rather belonged to Hermes. So there is that innovation in 600 years. Well, actually, no… The “deluge of Thoth” Creighton speaks of? That would be the same Thoth identified with Hermes, who in both Christian and Islamic lore predicted the Flood and prepared to save knowledge from its effects (Syncellus, Chronicon 41; Sa‘id al-Andalusi, Al‐tarif bi-tabaqat al-umm 39.7-16; Al-Maqrizi, Al-Khitat 1.40; etc.). So, in short, Creighton makes common cause with medieval fantasists but seems confident that he can dress up very late myths in the clothes of science. He begins by adopting the “science” of Robert Bauval, the fringe writer who proposed back in 1994 the so-called Orion Correlation Theory, which holds that the pyramids were designed to map out the stars of the constellation Orion on the ground. Bauval had taken inspiration from Robert Temple’s Canopus correlation theory—that Egyptian cities were planned to map out the constellation Canopus across Egypt—in a copy of Temple’s 1976 ancient astronaut book, The Sirius Mystery, that he happened to read at an airport. Following this, Creighton takes the fact that the Great Pyramid and Menkaure’s pyramid have indentations on teach face, making them technically eight sided, as connected somehow to the Templar cross—because Templars and Freemasons must always follow in the wake of any mystery. Hilariously, Creighton takes as true the claims of Freemasonry’s mythologizers that they are the successors to the Templars and thus to the Egyptians themselves, on the word of the mystical Victorian Mason Frank C. Higgins. He takes Higgins’s claim that the Templar Cross is a “fourfold triangle” and a “flattened pyramid” to mean that it therefore represent and eight-sided, flattened Great Pyramid. “It seems then,” Creighton writes, “that the Templar Cross depicting the eight-sided pyramid suggests that knowledge of the concavities of the Great Pyramid had been observed long ago and also that some significance was known to have been attributed to these curious features.” The Templars used primarily the cross pattee, but Creighton reads it as the Maltese cross to make it fit his ideas. We then move on to claims that there are secret chambers at Giza, and here the weaknesses in Creighton’s research start to show. He cites Edgar Cayce, of course, but also cites the Hellenistic Kore Kosmou and Marcellinus’ late Antique Roman History (22.15.30), but both secondhand. He has never read either—he cites a website’s discussion of them as the source. He then cites the Arab pyramid legend of Surid, which he quotes from J. Davies’ 1672 English translation of the French edition of the twelfth-century author Murtada ibn al-Afif (Murtadi ibn Gaphiphus), likely from this website due to some tell-tale OCR errors (e.g., Sahaloe for Sahaloc) that don’t appear in print editions, and without citing the translator at all. The same story is given also in Al-Maqrizi and Al-Idrisi, as well as in the earlier Akhbar al-zaman. He then reports on Al-Maqrizi’s accounts, but secondhand again, this time from Mark Lehner’s summary of them in The Complete Pyramids. Given that I’ve made the text available in English since 2012, there isn’t really an excuse for not knowing the original.After this, he cites more of the text of Sir John Mandeville from the passage I mentioned above—again secondhand, from Gary Osborn, as well as the so-called Egyptian Flood myth. This he takes from E. A. Wallis Budge’s From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, in the form of a translation of the Papyrus of Ani, which refers to a future flood—though, to be technical about it, the flood passage was added in translation from a fragmentary papyrus and doesn’t appear in the extant Papyrus of Ani. Typical of Creighton, he confuses Budge’s commentary with the bits of translated text, even while acknowledging that Budge believed the flood was an anticipated event, not a historical one, for the Egyptians.

What I don’t understand is how anyone can claim to use such texts to rewrite history without actually knowing the texts themselves or their contexts. Anyway, from this he concludes that the Egyptians long considered the pyramids to be talismans protecting against a flood. I guess that makes them of a piece with the Sphinx, since the same source Creighton cites (Al-Maqrizi at 1.10, quoting Al-Quda’i) says that the Sphinx “is said to be a talisman against high sands, and was intended to prevent sand from invading the cultivated land of Giza.” I guess Creighton didn’t read that part… or any part… of the texts he claims support his views.

Oh, and all of these medieval legends Creighton declares “ancient” because he is not able to tell the difference between the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Middle Ages. By declaring the medieval pyramid myths to be both ancient and true (though only selected myths), Creighton therefore has a quasi-historical basis for his claim that the pharaohs built the pyramids as part of an effort to preserve Egyptian culture from the Flood. Because of this assumption, he therefore concludes that the pyramids are chock a block with hidden chambers full of cultural detritus. This, however, is all remarkably scholarly compared to Creighton’s next chapter. There he takes as legitimate the Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, the 1930s fraud by Maurice Doreal (Claude Doggins), a neo-Theosophist who claimed that the poem he plagiarized from H. P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, and other weird fiction writers was a genuine Hermetic text from Atlantis. From clues in the tablets, he creates an elaborate geometric map from various angles in the pyramids to point toward what he thinks is the lost chamber of Osiris. What on earth am I to make of a book based on a hoax? It doesn’t help that later in the book he also accepts—from secondhand sources, of course—the medieval myth of Princess Scota, the supposed Egyptian who escaped to Scotland. I wrote about that here.

Next up, he tries to explain that the first sixteen pyramids built in Egypt form an image of Osiris when read north to south—even though the Egyptians viewed south as “up.” Somehow, this also means that the Giza pyramids aren’t part of Osiris at all but part of his headdress! This is especially confusing since Creighton also endorses the Orion Correlation Theory whereby the same pyramids are the belt stars of Orion, the constellation identified with Osiris in Egyptian times. Somehow they are both groin and crown of the same god! The Egyptians, according to Creighton’s chart, somehow managed to mangle the whole correlation and failed to finish it. They also left out such seemingly important parts of the god as his face and his crook and staff. Satellite photos provided on successive pages demonstrate that the “correlation” is greatly exaggerated in the above diagram and instead, as we might expect, the pyramids’ locations are much better explained by the curves of the Nile Valley. Having dispensed with his theory, Creighton next tries to prove it with a variety of hoary pyramid claims. The pyramids, he says, are too big to be tombs (Mandeville covered this in 1357!) and are too anonymous to be monuments to kings. He argues that the interior of the Great Pyramid was purposely insecure (though the Arabs who expended considerable effort to open it in the Middle Ages would surely disagree), and—of course—that there aren’t any mummies in the pyramids, so they couldn’t have been tombs. Here Creighton’s acceptance of Al-Maqrizi and his fellow medieval writers betrays him, for Al-Maqrizi reported, from an earlier writer, that when the pyramids were opened, the Arabs found within sarcophagi “closed with lids of stone which, once removed, let one see within them a man lying on his back, perfectly preserved and dried and on whose flesh is still visible the hair.” Regardless of whether this (and many parallel accounts) are literally true, the fact the Creighton wants us to accept Arab legends when it comes to Surid before the Flood but not their own accounts of (relatively) recent Arab history speaks volumes about his slipshod historiography and failure to consult primary sources. He does have an “out,” though. He concedes that someone might have re-used the pyramids as tombs later on. He then accuses former Egyptian antiquities minister Zahi Hawass of having masterminded a conspiracy to keep people like him from visiting the geometric point where he calculated the chamber of Osiris must be hidden. After this Creighton offers some linguistic claims in which the Scotsman argues that he understands hieroglyphs better than all of the assembled experts in the world. He would like to revise the translation of Giza’s ancient name of Akhet Khufu (the horizon of Khufu). He would like us to see Akhet not as the horizon but as an ibis, akhet, following Mark Lehner, who saw it as symbolic of the soul through its connection to the root for “radiant light.” Creighton, though, would like to change akhet to mean “light of wisdom,” and thus the pyramids to be a knowledge source, while also allowing it to mean something like “great flood” because the ibis was associate with the Nile flood. Remember—all of this is in service of proving medieval legends true! After this point, Creighton is intellectually spent, and the book starts to break down. Creighton devotes a chapter to trying to prove Zecharia Sitchin was right about the quarry marks in the Great Pyramid being fakes, which is frankly irrelevant to any of the arguments in this book since Surid is, by the evidence of the texts he cites, the builder of the Great Pyramid and also Khufu. This side trip seems to exist solely to imply the existence of a conspiracy—though later Creighton will admit that he thinks the pyramids are 7,000 years old rather than 4,500 as in standard chronology. Following this, he collects testimony from various catastrophist authors, handbooks of mythology, and Wikipedia that there really was once a Great Flood as well as terrible droughts. He then argues—and I wish I were making this up—that the pyramids once functioned as granaries, or “arks or recovery vaults to store massive quantities of grain and other seed types”! This is straight out of medieval legend, as John Mandeville (Travels, ch. 7) and Gregory of Tours (History of the Franks 1.10) wrote in calling the pyramids the “granaries of Joseph,” after the Biblical story of Joseph and Pharaoh. You see, he thinks soot found in the pyramids proves that they were once filled with grain, which, upon decaying, exploded. If that isn’t enough, he also accepts a strange scientific paper from 2007 that argued that because there weren’t enough hours of sunlight to grow the plants wooly mammoths ate in Siberia, earth obviously underwent a rapid geographic pole shift caused by superheated ions from a Mars-sized rogue planet passing by, thus causing Siberia to shift north and Egypt to slip south. Oh, and the planet evaporated, leaving no evidence to prove it was the real cause of the end of the Ice Age. Therefore, Creighton concludes, the Great Pyramid shows evidence of being aligned to stars before (Queen’s Chamber shafts) and after (King’s Chamber shafts) this dramatic pole shift. After this, he claims that the Renaissance artist Lorenzo Ghiberti drew Khufu’s pyramid as the Ark in his Florentine Baptistery Gates of Paradise image of Noah’s Flood. The Ark is indeed shown as a pyramid, but not due to a conspiracy but because Origen, in Genesis Homily 2, which Creighton has not read and knows only from a brief secondhand reference, said that he thought the three-story Ark had to be smaller on each successive level, creating a truncated pyramid. This text is paralleled by Philo in Questions and Answers on Genesis 2.5 and also Clement in Stromata 6.11, both unknown to Creighton. The conceit is this: The ark is 300 X 50 cubits at the base, but according Genesis 6:16, the Ark was but one cubit at the top, above the window. Therefore, these authors concluded it must slope upward to get to that small size, rather than have a little protrusion at the top. Here’s Clement’s version: “And the length of the structure was three hundred cubits, and the breadth fifty, and the height thirty; and above, the ark ends in a cubit, narrowing to a cubit from the broad base like a pyramid, the symbol of those who are purified and tested by fire” (trans. William Wilson). It’s silly, but what happens when you apply logic to myth. Most of the ancient authors explained this in great detail, but because Creighton doesn’t know the originals, he can read into a secondhand summary of Origin a conspiracy dating back to Egypt: “Perhaps these early writers and artists had access to ancient texts, now long since lost, that described the early, giant Egyptian pyramids in precisely such terms—as arks.” A further chapter proposes that the Egyptians raised the pyramids by lifting their blocks with hot air balloons. For evidence, he cites the infamous Dendera “Light Bulb,” which he instead reads as a hot air balloon being filled. This is, of course, irrelevant to the question whether medieval legends (which mention no balloons) are accurate accounts of the past. Again, Creighton is selective in what he wants us to assume is true. The next chapter summarizes the book, this time restating conclusions as facts and suggestions as closer to certainties. To this he appends an elaborate defense of the claim that bull bones found by Belzoni in Khafre’s sarcophagus in 1818 are not an intrusive burial as modern Egyptologists believe but rather the whole purpose of the pyramid—to mark it as a cenotaph of Osiris’s bull soul: “For conventional Egyptology to continue to insist that the earth and bull bones discovered by Belzoni in the stone container of G2 were nothing more than a later intrusive burial serves only to misinform and mislead; it’s a ploy designed solely to prop up and perpetuate a flawed paradigm (i.e., the pyramid tomb theory).” The book concludes with satellite imagery of 2009 excavations at the part of Giza that Creighton claims sacred geometry indicates is of extreme importance. He suggests that Zahi Hawass ordered the excavations as a direct result of Creighton publishing most of the information contained in this book in the forums of Above Top Secret and Graham Hancock’s website. He speculates that the Egyptian authorities uncovered immensely powerful artifacts from the site, though the subsequent fall of Hosni Mubarak and Zahi Hawass would suggest that it didn’t do them any good, much less restore Egypt to world-historical power. In the final analysis, Creighton claims to have ideas that will change our understanding of history but bases them on secondhand research, cherry picking, and appeals to conspiracy. It’s appropriate that Creighton is so interested in trying to prove medieval legends true since his own book is just as dependent on secondary summaries, excerpts, and ignorance as the worst texts of the Middle Ages.

Imagine that. Another book about the pyramids built around the conceit that Dr. Zahi Hawass is a dirty liar and a thief. It seems like standard fare for any fringe writer who even tangentially references pyramid stories to dredge up this bit of anti-Zahi propaganda, and I can't help but wonder who kicked it off in the first place. Like the Smithsonian Conspiracy claim it seems to spread far and wide across authors who are almost certainly uncritically aping one another.

The hot air balloon theory, however, is a new one to me and a refreshing bit of nonsense amid a long line of "sonic levitation" and other high-technology ramblings about Egyptian construction methods.

Reply

Not the Comte de Saint Germain

12/26/2014 07:21:38 am

Hawass was the inspector of the Giza Plateau for the Council of Antiquities during the 1990s, when the Orion Correlation Theory was all the rage, and ridiculed the fringe theorists' arguments. When he left that job, he became head of the entire agency. He's a longtime friend of Mark Lehner, another Giza expert and one of the staunchest defenders of the conventional view of the pyramids and sphinx. And he's a publicity hound, so his name gets around more than those of most egyptologists. In short, he made for a near-perfect Authority Figure Covering Up the Truth for nearly 20 years. The fringe theorists are probably subconsciously unhappy that he's not around anymore to be their punching bag.

Reply

Clint Knapp

12/26/2014 12:31:35 pm

I get why he's the target, just wasn't sure who started it. If it grew out of statements about the Orion Correlation, it'd make sense. I was too young to have noticed back then.

I agree with most of that assessment but the last sentence, though. Now that he's not in power, the idea I'm hearing most often is that he stole all of the valuable stuff for himself and there's no hope of recovering it at all. George Noory, surely acquiring the idea from one of his myriad guests, even likes to suggest that now that Zahi isn't in control "maybe" someone else with a more open mind will take the job and make great revelations just to spite the Mubarak regime.

Even without any real power left, Dr. Hawass still catches baskets of fringe dung on a regular basis; whether it's Scott Creighton failing to acknowledge the power shift in a brand new book, or George Noory perpetuating tales of Sphinx-chamber theft and hiding the "truth" away forever.

Shane Sullivan

12/26/2014 11:50:53 am

"The hot air balloon theory, however, is a new one to me and a refreshing bit of nonsense amid a long line of "sonic levitation" and other high-technology ramblings about Egyptian construction methods."

I feel that way as well. It has a certain facile verisimilitude even compared to the lightbulb interpretation, since unmanned hot air balloons date back nearly 2000 years, but with the same lack of proof.

Exactly the sort of thing they used to put on H2, before they went full-blown Ancient-Alien-Bible-Giant-Cookie-mode. =P

Reply

Scott Hamilton

12/26/2014 03:27:09 am

That 2007 paper is something else. It's basically Velikovsky revisited, but not in historical times. I looked up the authors, and Baltensperger seems to have published a bunch of paper all along the same lines, while the most interesting thing I could find about Woelfli is that he was consulted by the author of the book The Rape of the Turin Shroud, though the author didn't much like what he said.

Reply

Only Me

12/26/2014 05:55:23 am

I wonder where Creighton would rank on Michael Barkun's list of conspiracy culture traits?

How adorable! You want me to take you seriously, again! Run along now, I know you haven't finished playing with that new fire truck Santa brought :)

Uncle Ron

12/26/2014 08:37:56 am

Not that it matters in any real sense but: with all this speculation about the pyramids being granaries or storehouses of Egyptian culture against a great flood, has anyone ever investigated whether or not the pyramids are even water-tight?

Reply

Not the Comte de Saint Germain

12/26/2014 09:28:15 am

Not to my knowledge. They're actually built pretty sloppily—a lot of the stones don't fit together perfectly, leaving small cracks filled with sand or air. So I'm pretty sure they aren't.

For those interested, the Graham Hancock forum is riled up about this book review and very upset that since I'm not a professor I'm not qualified to review Creighton's claims!

http://www.grahamhancock.com/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=346529&t=346529

Reply

lurkster

12/26/2014 11:34:39 am

...and hilarity ensued!

Reply

EP

12/26/2014 02:20:30 pm

Why do you persist in hate-blogging, Jason?! :P

Reply

Clint Knapp

12/26/2014 02:25:26 pm

I like this one:
"I got my Ph. D. at Cornell, in Ithaca, and I have considerable experience with students and graduates from Ithaca College. That's enough to make me suspicious." - drrayeye

There you have it, Jason. Ithaca's not good enough! But Cornell... well, they clearly make scholarly geniuses there. The kind that defend insipid pyramid hoaxes...

Reply

EP

12/26/2014 02:27:33 pm

$5 says it's not even a real PhD, but an Ed.D. or something else completely irrelevant, like Doctorate in Social Work.

Clint Knapp

12/26/2014 02:34:17 pm

According to his forum profile, his name is Ray Briggs and he runs a website, rpbriggsandassociates.com, that is "Successfully helping to create scholarly leaders", quotes Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, and demands login to see anything else. Further investigation is just beyond my realm of caring.

VCB

12/28/2014 09:12:27 am

This is a rare opportunity for me to be helpful, as I have alumni access to far too many directories. Raymond Briggs got a real Arts & Sciences PhD from Cornell.......in 1973, when I was 13 or so years away from showing up as a freshman. Discipline not noted in his profile, but I think it's more a case of Super Old Dude with PhD He Hasn't Used in 30 Years than a non-existent or fake PhD.

Kal

12/26/2014 12:47:37 pm

What is it with these fringe people thinking a blog author and minor celebrity of fringe oddities is not worthy to comment on their stuff? An actual professor probably wouldn't be bothered to review this, so it's good someone did, and a review in a blog is not 'scholarly journalism' so it's okay to have an opinion. They just don;t like being called out on it.

Reply

Clint Knapp

12/26/2014 10:04:47 pm

Therein lies the problem, Kal. Jason is a journalist. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in both anthropology and journalism. If he's not qualified to do a book review about this sort of crap, who is? If a blog in which he's spent who-knows-how-many-millions of words evaluating the content of these claims is not "scholarly journalism" what is?

He's published, he's authored books examining the origins of these sorts of claims and more, and he makes time almost every single day to delve deeper than any fringe authors bother to in their own books and publications. He's exactly the sort of person who does qualify to do this; a journalist with a specialist background.

Compare this to Graham Hancock, who holds a First Class Honours degree in Sociology. First Class Honours degrees are undergraduate degrees in the UK. Sociology degrees are not archaeology or anthropology degrees, yet Hancock makes a living opining on archaeological matters. Those complaining on his forums about Jason's credentials are ignoring entirely that their own host is entirely unqualified to make the claims he's famous for.

Or Scott Wolter, who holds a Bachelors in Geology and is therefore entirely unqualified to determine ANYTHING about an artifact beyond what kind of rock it's made of. Yet Wolter pretends he knows more about history than experts and routinely dismisses their findings where they clash with his own unqualified claims.

The sad irony is that Jason is legitimately more qualified to discuss these claims than the adherents themselves, but they'll continue to insist he needs a higher form of legitimacy to evaluate them than they themselves need to make the claims in the first place. It's a never-ending cycle of "who is more qualified?", largely being argued by people who are not qualified at all.

Reply

Nate Lowery

12/26/2014 01:57:37 pm

...and now it appears that Scott may have inflated his resume : http://www.grahamhancock.com/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=345879&t=345879

Reply

EP

12/26/2014 02:30:49 pm

"Satellite photos provided on successive pages demonstrate that the “correlation” is greatly exaggerated in the above diagram and instead, as we might expect, the pyramids’ locations are much better explained by the curves of the Nile Valley."

Indeed, it would be at least a legitimate conjecture (and certainly more sensible than Creighton's proposal) that the symbolism of Osiris iconography itself derives its topography from the curves of the Nile Valley. Would at least make sense, given Nile's centrality for Egyptian religion and the cult of Osiris and given that, unlike the pyramids, the image of Osiris DIDN'T TAKE MANY CENTURIES TO BUILD!

Jason,
Thanks for reviewing this book by Scott Creighton. I have not seen it as yet , though I have been following his posting on other forums. I wish you had delved into Scott's "Vyse forgery" claims with a little more detail, but I enjoyed the information you provide on his "slipshod historiography." Good work.

His claims wasn't really relevant to the book, but if you'd like to know his evidence, it is this: (a) Vyse is a bad person whom no one liked and who committed fraud in other contexts, and (b) the German fringe people who scraped part of the red paint off of the relieving chambers last year claim that carbon dating found that the paint was only 200 years old, but the lab they said did the test refused to confirm their claim. Therefore, the name of Khufu is a fake and everyone is covering up the truth.

"there's an entire chapter devoted to the Vyse forgery controversy, inlcudng never-before-seen evidence uncovered from Vyse's private field notes when he was at Giza in 1837."

From what I read elsewhere, there has been a lot of controversy (and hype) in the past over the existence of Vyse's diaries that range from being lost to being suppressed as a part of some grand conspiracy. Creighton has apparently been claiming for several months that he finally found that long sought prize. He has also been spinning the find as a means of finally debunking or exposing Vyse's claim with the carrot-on-stick promise of would be revealed in this book.

Thus, all the hub bub on Hancock forums with the shocked response to this review not examining the 'big thing' everyone has been waiting for in this book.

So even though the chapter may have seen off-topic to the book's story arc, it's been his whipping post and pre-release interest builder for this publication since last summer. The fact that there is only one chapter on it, is somewhat surprising because it seemed like it was to be the main thrust of the book. But from what your saying, it's merely a retread of what he has already spread far and wide as a means of making a name for himself as the fringe theorist who debunked long-standing dismissal of the Vyse-fraud allegation by Egyptologists.

For one of many examples, see: http://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/2014/09/01/more-evidence-uncovered-in-howard-vyse-pyramid-fraud/ (Google "Howard-vyse handwritten journal" for tons more of similar ilk)

As well as several other boastful threads he has made on his ATS subforum: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/162/pg1/srtpages

Depending on how his presentation of that material is received, we could see a re-reversal of supporters for other fringe theorists like Hancock and Alford who despite early adoption, eventually distanced themselves from Sitchin's claims about the Vyse fraud conspiracy over time.

Color me jaded, but it seems totally unbelievable somebody like Creighton would a) be able to find, let alone get his hands on Vyse's original field notes. And b) only write a single chapter on the subject matter if he did have that kind of material. Especially after all of the drum-beating self-promotion he has done in so many different fringe mags and podcasts on the matter.

Scott is a complete idiot

7/26/2015 02:08:10 am

Scott has got to be the most retarded scammer ever. Everyone knows that IT network engineers aren't real engineers. That's a 2 year tech school degree

Martin Stower

9/19/2015 06:35:27 pm

Finding the Vyse journal is no big deal. It’s in a public archive. I traced it in 1998—and all it took then was one clue on the Web and one letter. A trained historian would have found it sooner—and it’s even easier now: UK archive material is catalogued online and Google provides a quick way in:

I put this in the same category as 'Dreams of My Fathers'... of ambiguous authorship. Bill Ayers was not just ambivalent when asked about it...he seemed uncertain what to say. Everything today is a sucker punch. Somebody gave me recently 'A Fountain of Fairytales'. It draws the reader in with reasonableness for about the first third of the book...then start making leaps of logic as though he'd established himself well enough to justify it. I've noticed that much of what I read nowadays is are carefully designed cognitive hitpiece...designed not to promote rationality but to obfuscate it by encouraging either hate or fancy. In my opinion this is a forseen modern dilemma in which a plethora of information is made available to masses which haven't had the good fortune to aquire well trained thinking. I loath the word 'Illuminati'...but unfortunately it seems a useful metaphor at a time when it seems there are those who have a use for widespread hate.

Scott has found clues that common scientists weren't able to find, because they simply lack the consciousness for it. Your alleged 'debunking' method is doesn't differ from the usual 'scientific' scholarly method. Your treatise isn't original, it isn't intelligent, and it isn't even interesting to read.

Maybe you can try to debunk real math that you can find in the attached article. It confirms that Scott is right.

So, that's 1-0 for Scott Creighton.

Reply

R Avry Wilson

7/4/2016 12:15:41 am

Jason,
Thank you for this informative review. I'd run into it during my current review of Creighton's new book on the Vyse forgery claim. I am delighted to discover his past works are as delirious as his more recent ones insomuch as it makes reviews all the more easy to contextualize as pure manifestations.

Reply

Greg Reeder

7/4/2016 01:22:50 pm

Hi Avry,
Where are you going to publish your review? Enjoy your comments on Graham Hancock's along with Martin's.

Reply

Leave a Reply.

About Me

I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.